Casey Reas

“I want programming to be as immediate and fluid as drawing.”
— Casey, {Software} Structures





This is my other studio. At UCLA. It's my office and also the home of the UCLA Arts Software Studio.
My garage. In Los Angeles. Near(ish) to the ocean.
Today it was angry guys from Ohio: early Devo, Brainiac, and Guided by Voices. It's different day to day, week to week. I have many secrets.



I had two large commissions in 2014 – a two-wall printed mural at the University of Texas at Austin and a thirty-six-screen software mural for a private collection in Washington D.C. I also published the second edition of Processing: A Programming Handbook for Visual Designers and Artists with MIT Press last December. Right now, I'm exploring new directions and working a number of smaller projects in software, photo, and for the web.







It's always the latest, so right now it's One-Point Perspective. The trick is to feel good about the work five and ten years later. In some ways, my first large work, the Tissue series, shown at the bitforms gallery in 2002 is special. It was the public catalyst for all that came after.
I work with statements, variables, loops, conditionals, functions, objects, and arrays.
The most accurate thing to say about my process is that it's different for each body of work. Sometimes it starts with research or a specific text and other times with sketches and drawings. Sometimes I just start writing code and I see where that leads. I do my best thinking with my eyes. I figure things out through cycles of creating and looking. In general, I start with how things work – how they behave and respond. The images emerge from the system, then later feeds back into it. My Instagram and cloned Tumblr are records of what is happening in and around my studio.
Burn the candles at both ends and don't stop.

Fig. 2 from Claude Shannon's “A Mathematical Theory of Communication”, 1948

John Cage's score of Fontana Mix, 1958

Fig. 1 from Paul Baran's “On Distributed Communications”, 1964

Figs. 1-1, 1-2, 1-4 from Richard Feynman's Six Easy Pieces, 1964

Fig. 3 from Valentino Braitenberg's Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology, 1986
TXT, PDE (Processing Development Environment), TIFF (Tagged Image File Format), ODT (OpenDocument Text), HTML (HyperText Markup Language)

I don't believe in inspiration.